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Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps perfect granularity of social networks can be achieved if little "towns" are aggregated on top of small Unix servers or VPS.

A 1GHz 1GB compute unit can probably handle 1000 people, with IRC level chatting and light browsing a text protocol like Gemini.

If each "town" has a maximum population before it becomes a grind and people want to move out there's a natural feedback mechanism.

Am elected local council can take care of some (sysadmin) things and vote on new services and boundary (firewall rules).

If people identify with an online location, instead of an amorphous brand maybe they'll take pride in the upkeep and so on.

It's an interesting metaphor/model, and the Tilde project certainly seems to have proved it can work. I wonder what wisdom the inhabitants could give to other federated social projects?

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This is what is happening with the Fediverse (sans the minimalism), only there is interoperability between all the small communities. I think it's the future, as long as it doesn't grow to fast.

One particular choice of Mastodon is that pretty much everything federates all the time. Some local instances try to create a sense of local community, but other than the local timeline page you might as well be anywhere.

Hometown is a fork of Mastodon that adds a "local only" post feature, posts that deliberately do not federate. I think it's an interesting experiment. https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown

> One particular choice of Mastodon is that pretty much everything federates all the time. Some local instances try to create a sense of local community, but other than the local timeline page you might as well be anywhere.

In theory.

In practice, this is the norm:

https://mastodon.social/about/more

https://wiki.todon.eu/todon/domainblocks

https://toot.cafe/about/more#blocked-instances

The latter doesn't even bother labeling the instances they don't like as "Hate Speech", apparently free speech is enough.

I wasn't thinking of the isolated little hate communities when I said "pretty much everything". Truth Social is another isolated little community based on Mastodon, for that matter.

That's not a million miles away from how Second Life operated (and still does). Where the 'Land' & 'Estates' (and parcels within them) were servers. Each has their own limitations to how many user avatars they can support at one time.

People flock to places they identity with. Buy parcels. Build their own space and communities within communities.

As far as 'voting' and governance goes, I think there's room for development with blockchain login/identity/ownership and Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) which support that.

> As far as 'voting' and governance goes, I think there's room for development with blockchain login/identity/ownership and Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) which support that.

Immediately turning it into a community of crypto bros where the only subject is cryptocurrencies and derivations. A figurative and literal waste.

You can vote without Blockchain, somehow everyone forgot about that. In fact Blockchain and other "trustless" mechanisms are completely useless in a community where people know each other, since Sybil attacks require anonymity.

This is essentially what discord is. Most people find a group of under 100 people which is a more personal space to interact with.

Except that discord isn’t anything like that, having centralized control of all these groups on one platform with global rules enforced upon all of them (see the recent iOS NSFW ban)

I agree the technical foundations aren’t like that but the social structure is. The incredible ease of setting up a new server is a strict requirement for discord being successful. I don’t think we’re at a point where you can have people self host this stuff easily.

The average person realistically doesn't care. You can just use the desktop app and switch a toggle that turns off the nsfw ban which is what Apple requires for apps. Discord and similar IM apps have become small scale social hubs for the world.

If you do not care about censorship, lock-in, and their anti-privacy policy.

I for one refuse to touch Discord.

Unfortunately, it’s where the people are.

Yeah it's mad how many FOSS projects use it for their comms. Like home assistant. Which was developed to keep your home automation away from the data mining cloud services. Yet to chat with them you have to use discord.

It's terrible considering there's so many good alternatives available that work great and offer the same user experience while respecting your privacy.

Discord even use this fact for advertising now :( https://discord.com/open-source

There’s some overlapping ideas with how groups on urbit operate. Though urbit goes further down the stack to replace the bits that make managing a Linux server hard (fixing the incentives that lead to everyone having to be on one centralized server in the first place).

I guess the server should enable instant messages between its users and only offer email communication with people outside

you do see a version of these dynamics in mmorpgs like eve online

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